We ♥ web applications!

Mobalean is lead by Henri Servomaa, the original founder and mobile developer.
At Mobalean we strive to develop services which are loved by our clients and users.
By working in an agile manner, quickly adapting to changing requirements,
we can deliver quickly and often.

Henri Servomaa

Hailing from Finland, Henri has a long history with computers and the internet.
With a background in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, he has worked
in Japan as Software Developer and System Admin since 2001. In 2005, he joined a
company to develop mobile sites for the Japanese market and has been involved in mobile ever since.

Contractors

Cleve Lendon is a Canadian engineer who has been contracting for Mobalean. He came to Tokyo in 1994, and has lived here ever since.
He has broad experience as a software developer, which includes development of mainframe software,
Internet applications and mobile apps (Android and iOS).
He is especially skilled at writing Java applications (vd. Simredo 4, Grafikilo 15).
When not programming, Cleve enjoys improv acting and studying languages, such as Latin and Esperanto.

Mobalean Alumni

Paul McMahon and Michael Reinsch were co-founders of Mobalean. They have moved to Doorkeeper KK, a company they established in 2013. Both are now actively developing the doorkeeper platform.

Web Development

Our strength is crafting web services for both Japanese and international markets.
We bring our technical and cultural experience to help you adapt your ideas into successful products.

We develop with Ruby on Rails and use the best agile practices and tools,
such as test driven development and continuous integration to achieve quality.

Japanese Mobile Consulting

We are the leading provider of technical expertise about the Japanese mobile web. Mobalean started when the smartphones were just appearing on the market.
Our Keitai Web Technology Guide
is a quick starting point for learning about the initial challenges of Japanese mobile development. Although the technology stacks have changed since the proliferation of iOS and Android, some of the idiosyncrasies remain. Most notably, the Japanese market is still very much dominated by the big three carriers: DoCoMo, au and Softbank.
Developers can find more technical details in our Keitai-Dev Wiki.

Call us

Kara-mail for Japanese mobile sites

Kara-mail (空メール) is a user interface design pattern commonly seen in Japanese mobile web sites. As all Japanese mobile phones have an email address, registration for mobile sites usually requires an email address. However, entering an email address is relatively time consuming for a user to do. So instead of asking the user to input the email address, sites have a user send them an empty email, hence the name kara-mail (kara is Japanese for empty). After the site receives the email, the site will reply with an email containing a sign up link. Upon clicking the sign up link, the user can then complete the sign up process.

On Doorkeeper, we use kara-mail to allow users to easily sign up to attend an event via their mobile.

Kara-mail Registration with Doorkeeper

Because mobile spam is particularly annoying, mobile carriers have a setting that will allow users to block all email that do not come from other mobile devices or a specifically whitelisted domain. To help users whitelist our domain, we link directly to the carrier settings page. Additionally, as most Japanese mobiles do not support copying of web page text, but do allow copying of form input text, we put our domain in a form input so a user can easily copy it.

Depending on the mobile carrier, we show an appropriate link to the settings. The links are